Jim Staihar

LAPA Fellow

Jim Staihar is currently a Law and Philosophy Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. His main scholarly interests are in criminal law theory, ethics, jurisprudence, and political philosophy. He earned an A.B. in philosophy from Cornell University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He served as an editor on the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, where he wrote a dissertation on the justification of state punishment. While in graduate school, he held a John M. Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics at the University of Michigan Law School. In his dissertation, he defends a novel theory of why and how much criminals deserve to be punished. His article "A New Systematic Explanation of the Types and Mitigating Effects of Exculpatory Defenses" is forthcoming in the New Criminal Law Review. At LAPA, he will work on several projects involving an issue of punitive desert or blameworthiness. Some of these projects concern the role that moral luck should play in criminal liability, permissible forms of punishment, and the plausibility of a principle of alternate possibilities. More generally, he will explore limits on the types of conduct that a state is permitted to criminalize.